Military disability issues keep PTSD soldier trapped

Military disability issues keep PTSD soldier trapped
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Apr 11, 2014
Although Sgt. Chris Peden suffers from mood swings and insomnia due to post-traumatic stress disorder, the Tacoma resident has had to continue going to work in his infantry battalion for the past year and a half because of the military's complicated disability retirement system. "My brain literally just doesn't work the way it used to, " he said. In the background is his wife Karen.

In the report Sgt. Chris Peden mentioned soldiers going AWOL. (One more topic that does not merit attention from the press.) Here are a few stories about AWOL soldiers.

Brian Harkin for The New York Times 2007
Two soldiers in Texas, Ronnie and James, who did not want to be fully identified, are among the Army deserters who are facing courts-martial.

In the 2006 fiscal year, 3,196 soldiers deserted, the Army said, a figure that has been climbing since the 2004 fiscal year, when 2,357 soldiers absconded. In the first quarter of the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, 871 soldiers deserted, a rate that, if it stays on pace, would produce 3,484 desertions for the fiscal year, an 8 percent increase over 2006.

Sgt. Brad Gaskins, 25, of East Orange, N.J., said he left the northern New York post in August 2006 because the Army wasn’t providing effective treatment after he was diagnosed with PTSD and severe depression.

Spc. Justin Faulkner, 22, of Stanton in eastern Kentucky, returned to his unit Tuesday, Brandy Faulkner said. She said she talked to him on the phone and that officers in his 101st Airborne Division combat engineer outfit welcomed him back. “He’s back on base, they’re treating him with respect and getting him the help he needs,” Brandy Faulkner said.

Cindy Goforth knows about the problem first hand. She has two sons. One who's back from Iraq, 19-year-old David, and the other who's serving his third tour there. She said her younger son is in jail because of PTSD and she hopes the new study will help convince him he can be treated. "The night before he come home on R and R one of his best buddies was killed and he did not handle that well. He didn't handle that one well at all," said Goforth. That was in October. He was supposed to go back in November, but went AWOL at the airport. "Did he ever get mental health treatment when he came home? No, of course they teach them to be Army strong. Well, they're Army strong. The only problem is these kids don't realize they've got problems," said Goforth.

The Chicago Tribune tells the story of Spc. 4 Eugene “Doc” Cherry, an Army medic who served in Iraq with the 10th Mountain Division and returned home with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Unfortunately, Cherry’s experiences are ones that VFA has seen many, many times. Cursory exposure to the psychiatrist in the field, long waits for appointments back in America, commanders making it next to impossible for servicemembers with mental injuries to receive help, going AWOL: this is a pattern that affects more and more servicemembers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Is this anyway to treat a soldier? One of the worst stories I've read

Dominic Meyer was on his way to Iraq. Soon he would be pulling another soldier out of a burning Humvee. The man was returned to his family a triple-amputee, blind and deaf.

Four times in the space of four months, the unit was jarred by the sound and the fury of a roadside bomb. Jangled nerves are evidently part of the bargain. Sometimes adrenaline is your only friend in Iraq.

Meyer was shot three times while he was there. His flak jacket may have saved his life. His buddy wasn't so lucky. He was killed by sniper fire.

There is no emotion in Meyer's voice. There's something in the way he looks at you, though. His eyes tell you they have seen far too much. "He has an old soul," says his mother, Dana Spencer. Dominic Meyer is 20.

The Army sent him home in July, 18-day leave. On the 17th day of his furlough he was hit by a car in Sayreville, late at night. The driver didn't stop. Six months later his knee still bothers him. He walks with a cane.

After the hit-and-run accident, there was some mix-up. "In the confusion of having him formally transferred back to Fort Hood (Texas) for treatment, he was designated AWOL," his mother wrote in a letter to the Press. It's complicated. The doctor at Fort Monmouth has to talk to the commanding officer at Fort Hood who has to talk to the commanding officer in Iraq. Lot of paperwork, maybe a letter doesn't get stamped somewhere along the line, who knows.

By Sept. 29, Meyer was ready to report for duty. He was anxious to rejoin his unit in Iraq. He packed up his gear and loaded it into his 2003 Ford F-150. He would drive through the night, less traffic.

But before he got on the road, he was pulled over by the police, around 11:15 p.m. Someone called complaining about a pickup truck and a motorcycle racing up and down the street.

Meyer's registration was expired and he had no insurance. Then the officer saw the butt of a bayonet sticking out of the defroster vent.

The next day there was a story in the local paper: "Man AWOL from Army found in Sayreville with cache of weapons." In addition to the bayonet, the story went on to say that police had found two handguns, several magazines of ammunition, several knives, a hatchet and an unspent hollow-point bullet.

Meyer spent the next 57 days in the Middlesex County Jail. His bail originally was set at $100,000, with no 10 percent option. Under New Jersey's tough new gun law, enacted last year as a means to combat gang violence, Meyer could be facing mandatory prison time.

There are a lot more stories like these. How many? Well AWOL has been such a huge ignored story that it appears even the military wasn't really paying attention. They arrested a Marine 5 years after he was discharged in California.

In 2007 the Army was discharging 10 a day for "personality disorder." By 2012 "more than 20,000 men and women who exited the Army and Marines during the past four years with other-than-honorable discharges that hamstring their access to VA health care and may strip them of disability benefits." But last year it was 11,000 from the Army.

$16 million in paychecks over a 2 1/2-year period to soldiers designated as AWOL or as deserters, the second time since 2006 the military has been dinged for the error. A memo issued by Human Resources Command at Fort Knox, Ky., found that the Army lacked sufficient controls to enforce policies and procedures for reporting deserters and absentee soldiers to cut off their pay and benefits immediately. The oversight was blamed primarily on a failure by commanders to fill out paperwork in a timely manner.

But it gets worse considering "more than 100,000 other troops left the armed services with "bad paper" over the past decade of war."

All of this left this result. About 1,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan war era are diagnosed each week with post-traumatic stress disorder and more than 800 with depression, according to VA statistics.